Tyrannosaur Found in China

Finding by American Museum of Natural History Paleontologists and Others Underscores Evolutionary Links among Living Birds and Non-Avian Dinosaurs

Yutyrannus huali, was covered from head to tail in downy feathers, which is assumed to be an ancestor of Tyrannosaur rex. It is found to be 30 feet large and 3000 pounds in weight, but was not as big as Tyrranosaur rex, which came around 60million years after Yutyrannus huali. It is assumed to be 130-million-year-old primitive tyrannosaur which was covered with branched protofeathers.

The discovery provides “direct evidence for the presence of extensively feathered gigantic dinosaurs,” wrote paleontologists led by Xing Xu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in their description of the new dinosaur, published April 5 in Nature.

This was found in the Yixian Formation, a fossil deposit in northeastern China.This place in the last two decades has yielded dozens of dinosaur skeletons. And the name Yutyrannus huali meant beautiful feathered tyrant in Latin and Mandarin. The presence of feathers on these dinosaurs have changed our view in regarding these animals feathery rather than covered by scales.

The magnificance of this organism is its body size and the density of feather-like structures, said paleontologist Julia Clarke of the University of Texas at Austin. “We didn’t know whether these larger-bodied forms would show as many.” While it is still ambiguous whether Tyrannosaur rex had a feathery body as such of its ancestors. If the primary purpose of feathers was insulation, Thanks to small surface-to-volume body ratios, large-bodied animals tend to maintain heat easily.

We might get these questions in our mind on these findings about feathers; What were tyrannosaur feathers used for? Might the king of dinosaurs have strutted like a peacock? Yutyrannus huali, a newly discovered ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex, was covered from head to tail in downy feathers.